Smart Farming?

Climate change, climate growth, and increasingly scarce resources are putting great strain on agriculture and the farmers trying their best to get the most out of the land they have. I guess you are wondering how can embedded systems help? An embedded system isn't going to create more land, grow more crops and most farm work is done by pure manual labor with no electronic equipment involved especially when it comes to animals on smaller farms like my own. As you can imagine doing every task by hand isn't always the most cost effective and it is certainly not the fastest or most accurate.

Let's take an example from one of  my jobs on the farm, spreading fertilizer. Spreading fertilizer involves using a fertilizer spreader on the back of a tractor like the one seen below and trying to judge where to spread the fertilizer based on lines made in the field by the tractor. Many people would think that it would be easy to see the tracks made by the tractor so placing the tractor a certain distance away from the previous track when spreading should be simple right? If there is a lot of grass in the field then maybe the tracks are easy to see but when there is very little grass it becomes nearly impossible to judge where to drive the tractor. So much so that spreading the field becomes a whole guessing game for when to turn hoping that you don't spread the same area twice. Getting the perfect even coverage just isn't really a possibility to the point where my father would say "just spread it the best you can it will be grand".

Fertilizer Spreader Example

So this is where an embedded system comes in. What if the tractor was not controlled by a person but a circuit? If the tractor had sensing technology and was aided by satellites the tractor could automatically perform the field work and it would certainly spread fertilizer more accurately than I ever could.
Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE in Kaiserslautern, Germany demonstrated how the interaction of machines in cyber-physical systems operates safely and securely at the "Embedded World 2013" trade show in Nuremberg. These researchers believe that in the future, agricultural machines will be able to communicate with each other and will be controlled via smartphone or tablet.

by Thomas Murphy.

Smart Agriculture